Even if you don’t think of your current relationship with your mother as sour, it’s a great place to start practicing mindfulness. During the next several visits with your mother, over the next several months (or several decades), try to increase the number of seconds you spend in self-observation mode. Why? Because the more you can observe yourself, even in those “clutch moments” of tension, the more you can control your fight-or-flight response. That means you will find the right thing to say at the right time, because you will be thinking more calmly.

At first you may only be able to observe or notice your anxiety about seeing your mother while you’re physically on the way there. When you’re actually present with her, your instinctive emotions may run too high for you to be able to be observing yourself. If you make a conscious effort, however, you may be able to observe what you’re feeling after you’ve come home from your visit, so you can thoughtfully go over your interactions with her, and pick out places where you “fell off the horse,” so you can do better next time.

Generally speaking our first steps toward observing self involve the moments before and after meeting with a person with whom we have tension or feel uncomfortable. As we make progress, we’re able to gradually increase the number of seconds (yes, seconds) when we can observe ourselves in his or her presence. Even then, it’s easier to observe ourselves when someone else is talking, and we’re not.

Only the masters at observing self can feel compassion for a person who is verbally attacking them. That compassion takes decades to accomplish. Fortunately, even a millimeter of progress improves all our relationships, so our efforts are never wasted.

Nonetheless, I foresee that you will become discouraged at what seems like a snail’s pace of progress. Don’t beat yourself up. For those of us who consider life to be a spiritual journey, that journey usually involves learning to accept ourselves and others as we are. If that’s the case, then your efforts observing yourself are a central part of your spiritual journey, so there’s nothing more important you could be doing.

The more often you can observe yourself as you interact with other family members, the more often you can control your emotions. The more you can control your emotions, the easier it is to observe self for longer and longer intervals. As you increase your intervals of observing self, it becomes easier to control your emotions, and so on. It’s a circle of progress-spiraling upward!

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David Code is an Episcopal minister, family coach, writer, and founder of The Center for Staying Married & Raising Great Kids.

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